Back Home: What I Notice

The Caravansary in JFK Airport

One of the advantages of international travel is that you notice things that you took for granted in your home culture.  Experiencing another culture's ways of doing things makes you aware of things they do differently that is outside your experience.  When you return to your home culture, things stand out that are different from the outside culture.  The trick is to pay attention and write them down before they become common and part of the background of your life.

So, here are the things I noticed the first few days back:

Guns prohibited signs
Everywhere. The first sign I noticed as we walked the gangway at the JFK airport was "no guns."  (Like, what are you going to do with your piece between the airplane and customs?) I got used to seeing "Horsecarts prohibited," but haven't seen that sign in 9 months.  No wonder Europeans think we are gun obsessed culture.

A plethora of entertainment
We flew Jet Blue to SFO for a family wedding as soon as we arrived in the states.  Jet Blue offers satellite radio and TV at each seat. Nice.  But I'm thinking, "this is what the average cable subscriber in the US gets," as I scroll through 99 TV channels and about 150 radion stations.  And you know, I couldn't find one channel that I was interested enough in to stay for more than 15 minutes.

Traffic moves slower, but no better
After enduring Romanian cabdrivers for nine months, an experience worthy of a live action Crazy Taxi amusement park ride, the traffic flow was downright slow.  But drivers still run stop signs, cut you off, turn across lanes, stop in the middle of the road, and other irritating actions.

A Melting Pot
Walking the streets of San Francisco, we encountered Chinese, Korean, Japanese, El Salvadoran, Nicaraguan, Mexican, African-American, African immigrants, Indian.  Most of these consider themselves [        ]-American, and maintain their cultural traditions while acculturating to the majority culture.

At a globalization conference, I learned about a blogger in London who decided to see how many immigrants from the 195 countries in the world he could meet on the London Underground.  The speaker said he lacked three countries (I can't find the blog or I would give a link).  A reminder that the world is a small place.

In Romania, there are fewer global citizens, except in the universities with exchange students from all over Africa, Asia, Middle East, Europe and America.  And in Romania there is much greater attention to "who is Romanian," and people with a Romanian passport will not identify themselves as Romanian, "I'm not Romanian, I'm Hungarian."  That's a big one in Transylvania, where the region passed back and forth between Hungary and Romania over the past 900 years.  Hungarian ethnic nationalism is a big deal.  And some Romanians will say other people with Romanian birth certificates are "not Romanian," as in the Roma, an ethnic minority who have lived in the region for about 1000 years, the Jews, who came with the Roman empire, and the Germans, who immigrated and established fortified cities starting in 1141.  During the Ceausescu era, Romania took payments from GDR to deport people of German ancestry (residents for 900 years) and from newly created Israel to deport Jews, which reinforced that "Us-Them" way of looking at the world.

Nicula, The Heart of Romanian Orthodoxy

We visited the Nicula Monastery as a guest of Radu, a Romanian Orthodox priest that we met in Cluj.  The monastery is home to the “Holy Weeping Icon of the Mother of God, “ which is considered the heart of Romanian identity in Transylvania. The tradition of painting glass icons began at Nicola as a way for pilgrims to take home reminders of their piety.

The Holy Weeping Icon and Romanian Nationalism

The icon was painted in 1681 by a village priest for the benefit of peasants in his parish. After a few years the icon was given to a larger church in Nicula.  In 1694, Hapsburg officers were visiting the church and noticed the icon was weeping.  This created quite a stir, villagers came with handkerchiefs to collect the tears which effected healings and good fortune. 

The count who ruled over the region took the icon for himself, but the peasants kept a constant vigil outside his castle and asked for it back, threatening to burn his castle.  The count decided to build a church at a nearby monastery to house the icon; some accounts say he was forced to do this by the Hapsburg Emperor.   

The faithful Romanians attribute the tears to the Holy Mother weeping over the Romanian Orthodox Church being forced to affiliate with Rome., “a forewarning to the sad events that were to hit around the year 1700,” according to a plaque at the monastery. The affiliation occurred with the Act of Union of 1698, according to the Wikipedia article on the Greco-Catholic Church of Romania, which allowed the Byzantine rites while giving allegiance to the Pope.  The Hapsburg Empire decreed that all churches in Romania were Roman (Greco-Catholic is the term they use now), the Orthodox holdouts tried to build new churches.  So the Hapsburg Empire prohibited building stone churches (Wikipedia says it was during the 17^th and 18^th centuries), and the Romanian orthodox found a loophole in building wooden churches, which are so prominent in western Romania. We heard stories of instances where the Austrian army would desecrate Romanian churches by riding their horses into the sanctuaries, thus the explanation for the low doorways in the wooden churches, to keep the horses out.

Painted Glass Icons

During the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the monastery and icon became a pilgrimage site.  During the holiday Dormition of Mary (August 15) up to  30.000 pilgrims  camp out on the surrounding hills. The priests taught the pilgrims to paint copies of icons on glass to take home with them, a tradition unique to Transylvanaia.  Because they were traced by peasants, they have an innocence and simplicity in their rendering.

The Monastery during Communism

When the communists came the weeping icon was stored for safekeeping in the village, inside a wall in one of the houses.  The pilgrims continued to come to the Nicula valley to show their devotion and also their nationalist pride. As was common with the Communists, the monastery was closed to the public with only a few older monks left to tend the grounds.  It remained open only because of the collection of glass icons which were seen as a Romanian cultural heritage.  When the wooden church and all  the icons burned in 1972, the Communists proposed closing the monastery.  However, the abbot moved a nearby wooden church and asked all the people in the area to donate their glass icons so he could demonstrate to the communists that the church and icons still existed.  The communists relented with their idea.

After the fall of Communism the weeping icon was brought out of its walled storage and placed in the monastery where faithful Romanians come to venerate the image of the Virgin.

Danube Delta Trip

We glided through narrow, winding channels lined with a canyon of reeds for a half hour, then around a bend, a broad lake opened up in front of us.  The horizon was ringed with reed banks, and where the reeds met the edge of the lake was a shimmering, like sparkling diamonds.  Before we could ask what that was, a curtain of birds, thousands of them, rose to the sky--white pelicans.  It was perhaps the most beautiful sight in my life.

We were touring with Peter and Caroline Vasiliu, our hosts in Crișan, a small village on the Danube Delta.  Peter grew up on the Delta, his father was a tour guide, and he and his wife opened one of the first eco-tourism lodges on the Delta.  The accomodations were nice, the food outstanding, and the company was international, as we were the only Americans we encountered the whole time we were on the Delta.

The B&B has a traditional thatched roof

Nancy's new friend Laura, Peter and Caroline's 3 yr old daughter